


Phone Sex Isn't Really a Relationship (Is It?)

by florahart



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Clint sometimes has self-esteem issues, M/M, Oblivious Phil Coulson, Phil also has self-esteem issues, Phil is lying to himself again, Phil/not-Clint (kinda), Phone Sex, Pining while pretending not to and also being in a relationship, Roughly MAoS compliant, phone sex for pay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-01
Updated: 2015-02-01
Packaged: 2018-03-10 00:06:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3269324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/florahart/pseuds/florahart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Phil Coulson has two vices, and when we wakes up not-dead after being stabbed by Loki, the doctors won't let him have one of them (coffee), so maybe he can have the other? Seems only fair.</p><p>Of course, the other is phone sex with a guy who sounds a lot like a certain asset Phil is a little in love with, and managing that while in the hospital might have special challenges.  Such as a lack of opportunity, a lack of anything resembling stamina, and oh hey, the guy apparently not wanting to hear from him any more.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Phone Sex Isn't Really a Relationship (Is It?)

**Author's Note:**

> This is a fic I've been poking at forever, and is another that started with a half-asleep dream involving the first few lines. It hasn't been to a beta, but I think I've more or less found logical and editorial oopses; however, pointing at things I've missed is okay with me, if you wanna.

“Who the fuck _is_ this?” the voice growls on the third ring.

Phil gasps; the guy sounds even more like Clint than he remembered; or rather, he's never heard this guy roll up suspicion and hurt and anger, so he's never had a reason to know he does it just like Clint does. Did. Does. “I. This is Jedidiah.” It's not, in fact, what his J stands for, but it could be, and for the sake of privacy, it's the persona he built on his own, outside of SHIELD's servers and without the knowledge of even Nick Fury. It's his safe persona, and it's the one he's always used to make this call.

“Bullshit. I don't know what your game is, but that's _bull_ shit and I don't want to play.” The line goes dead, and Phil stares at it for a while, then dials again. His call goes straight to voicemail, to the no-thanks-I'll-call- _you_ message he got four days ago when he called the same number from another line, and he sets down the phone and thinks about that for a while. Because, he's gotten voicemail on trying to reach Will before, but it's never been like this; it's always been more sorry-I-missed-ya. And Will has always called him back.

He misses that more than should be at all possible or reasonable.

The thing is, Phil has two serious vices in his life, and the doctors have told him in no uncertain terms that one of them, coffee, is off limits for the foreseeable future—he can't even get any of the staff to sneak him in a drop of the stuff, because they are all evil and/or not clear on how yes yes it's a stimulant, but Phil neeeeeds it. So that's one vice out the window. And apparently now the other won't talk to him.

Not that a person is, exactly, a vice. Except for how he really kind of is. Phil shakes his head and considers turning on the TV. The real TV, thank God.

Coming back from the dead—all right, it doesn't _suck_ , because being dead would be, is demonstrably, worse, but it has significant drawbacks. For example, for the first several weeks he was awake, every time he asked about the fallout and the cleanup, he was shushed like a five-year-old to the extent that by the time they finally let up, he was considering whether finding a way to ask the question in a format which closely matched _are we there yet?_ would be inappropriate. 

Plus, all that time the TV and radio in the room were just exactly as fake as the one in the room in which Captain Rogers woke up, a falsehood he'd argued against on Cap's behalf then and which he now feels he would argue against a lot harder if he could go back and try again, because the TV was only able to receive track meets, episodes of _Little House on the Prairie_ and _Touched by an Angel_ (seriously?), and seventies game shows. Other things, like news or shows with explosions or plot arcs, might be upsetting.

Out of unmitigated self-preservation, because losing his mind seemed like a terrible second act after unexpectedly surviving Loki, Phil has developed a deep investment in the burgeoning relationship of Laura and Almanzo, significant opinions regarding Chuck Woolery's wardrobe, and an impressive degree of skill at guessing what Charles Nelson Reilly might say next—but honestly, what he really needs it to get back in the world and let those opinions and skills atrophy to nothing. Which is where the phone call comes in.

Because Phil's other vice _actually_ involves paid phone sex with a man who—and he has never been dishonest with himself about this, even if it is a private matter—sounds a lot, more than a lot, more like exactly, like his favorite specialist.

He's not dishonest with _himself_ about what he wants; he _is_ dishonest, at least in the sense of omission, with other people, because the power issues inherent, were he to proposition the man, are more than he feels safe about. Or more to the point, he isn't sure Clint would feel safe, and making Clint feel safe is one of his higher priorities in life.

Or at least, it was; even though for the last couple of weeks he's had a TV that shows material produced in this millennium (with fucking parental controls on about half the channels, because evidently the evil is not confined to the coffee-withholders) he still hasn't been able to find out what happened to Clint, and he can't imagine anyone would have kept at least Natasha from letting him know, and so has no real choice but to assume the worst. Practically speaking, he hopes it was quick, and that Clint never regained awareness at all; being used as a pawn would have been one of the worst kinds of torture for him, and Phil knew that when he went to try to make it stop in the first place.

It was why until the previous week he'd been putting off the phone call to Will, because he hasn't been sure he could stand to hear Will without knowing it was still Clint-by-proxy. But. He's technically out of the emergency ward (in Tahiti, apparently, what the hell?) now and under private care (and at least to some extent, that means actually _private_ , in the sense of respecting his physical privacy), and it's worse to hear nothing than something, so. He'd hoped that Will would talk to him for a few minutes, but the first time he called the remembered number it was from a phone he asked the PT guy to get for him “for personal calls” as though he meant to call his mother or aunt. As though either of them had the security clearance for anything a still-slightly-drugged Coulson might put out there, but hey, the PT guy didn't need to know that. 

Phil hasn't filed a report on that gap in how nonemergency medical staff and clearance levels interplay, mostly because he's still working on how to frame the topic of why he wanted a phone, but in any case, that meant he had one. Has one. A phone.

So then, after the voicemail reroute, a week had gone by with no response before he'd considered how he'd connected with Will in the first place, years ago now, how Will had said eighteen months ago one night that he didn't take new clients, and...maybe the message had been deleted unheard on principle? Anyway, he'd coerced the youngest of the nursing staff to make a run by his personal (non-SHIELD) apartment last night, asking for familiar clothes and blankets, and, off-handedly, the smartphone in the drawer by his bed. Personal contact information and so forth, of course.

It had been too much to hope he could get wifi in here; there's still absolutely nothing he can do to find out about Clint. There's no answer at his cell, or at Natasha's. Nick remains unwavering in his position that Phil needs to heal. SHIELD's front desk doesn't recognize his passcodes and wouldn't put him through to records or for that matter to Jasper, and none of the staff in his unrecognized new facility know a damn thing. He's starting to think they were explicitly selected for their utter disinterest in current events.

So, fine. He puts the phone away in his bag because he's going to try again later, one last time, and sets about doing the evening exercises the PT guy left.

They suck, even when they don't involve the possibility of him falling on his ass in the PT room. His breastbone is nearly fully healed and the affiliated muscles are technically knit back together, but every stretch and every pull burns like nothing has since he was a scrawny thirteen-year-old trying and failing to pass the presidential fitness assessment thing in phys ed (he hadn't; it had been another three years before he'd outgrown the scrawniness and developed a sufficiently-dedicated routine to start putting on lean muscle and running for distance; still, he remembered being bewildered by how everyone else could do fifty sit-ups and pull themselves over the bar while his own body just ...didn't, and this was a lot like that).

So dedicated routines have served him well before, and when Nick shows up to meet him on his release from intensive care, he's working on balance and being able to walk on his own; he has developed enough upper body strength to use the walker for assistance, so that's something.

Nick looks him in the eye and says, “It's been a long road back, Phil, and I have a different assignment for you to start looking toward. Are you ready for me to read you in?”

Phil nods automatically, but pauses. “I am, but first: the Initiative?”

“They're doing fine,” Nick tells him. “They even got your boy back.”

He has to know that's high on the list of things Phil _has_ to know before he gets anything else done, but Phil's still a little surprised it's first up. Surprised, but grateful. “They—Clint _survived_?”

“And fought. Avenged you. All of them did.”

Avenged him. Phil thinks about that for a minute. “They think I'm dead. Even— ”

Nick shrugs. “Can't make myself a liar, Phil, and it worked. I don't think they'd have pulled themselves together, without the push—you were right about that. I don't think it's time yet to change that.”

Phil closes his eyes and pushes away the loss in his heart at the thought of Strike Team Delta moving on without him, but they're all right, alive, apparently well. That's more important than anything he needs, right? If Clint is safe—both of them, but what his heart says first is Clint—then he will do what it takes to keep that true even if it means he only gets to look from afar with no chance of touching. He gives himself a couple seconds to grieve that, then swallows, nods once more, and follows Nick to the car and back to SHIELD. It's a temporary reprieve from the PT folks, on Fury's authority; Phil knows they'll talk about the new plan, and then he'll be right back in his room. Ugh. “You were saying, something about a different assignment?”

That night, he fishes out the phone again and calls Will. It's as close as he's going to get, it seems.

It still goes to voicemail, and he doesn't leave a message.

\--

It's been about six years, maybe seven, since Phil started down the phone sex rabbit hole.

He never actually meant to go there, not really. It was initially, a decade ago (more? Probably more), just sort of idle looking, in the back of a local publication whose readership was “alternative,” which mostly meant left-leaning and government-mistrusting, but which also meant interested in reading personal ads for same-sex hookups or interactions. He’d read those for a couple of years, wondering—all right, it wasn't like he’d never done any quick and dirty gay-bar twenty-minute exchanges of fluids, but somewhere around the time he’d turned thirty, they’d lost their appeal. Or he’d lost his. Whatever; it had stopped being something he felt okay about doing. And so he’d been casually reading the personals, considering whether he wanted to place one of his own.

You know: balding male bureaucrat pushing middle age, looking for uncomplicated sex with similar, no strings, no questions, no names. 

Except, somewhere along there, he also had acquired an asset who pushed every button Phil had. Arms and ass like anyone might only dream of. Smart mouth. Eyes that saw everything (physically, yes, but also with the intelligence to assess every glimpse and shred of data and put it together into a whole). The kind of neediness Phil wanted to fix. The kind of busted-up self-image Phil wanted to soothe. In short, exactly everything Phil could want, physically and emotionally, and naturally the man was directly in Phil’s command chain and entirely out of Phil’s league.

And so his personal ad, the one in his head that he would theoretically place, had become more specific, more complicated, more absurdly unattainable. What hot late-twenties built brilliant messed-up heroic cocky smartass would look at an ad for a balding bureaucrat and think, hey, just my type?

And so by then, he was reading the ads, imagining scenarios, and jerking off after dinner over not-even-porn in the back of the paper.

Then, six or seven years ago, he’d noticed that some of the ads were for phone sex, for a voice in his ear while he touched himself, and all right, he could imagine all the physical traits, right? He could ask for them to pretend? So he’d spent an hour one evening creating an untrackable persona, one that was mostly himself with another name (safe enough; none of his SHIELD-built personae were him at all) and called one of the numbers.

He wasn’t that surprised when it was a front for something that required a credit card; fortunately he’d already started the set-up on that, and he’d called back the next day with everything in order and spent a pleasant twenty minutes with someone calling himself Stone (the only challenge had been getting past the name. Stone? Seriously?). He’d paid the bill when it came in, and thought it had been fun, but not amazing, and maybe that would be the end of it.

And then at some point he'd found himself considering making another call, and that's how it went, for a while. He'd call the line, get some guy, jerk off while they guy talked to him or praised him or whatever, and then he'd tell himself probably he wouldn't call again.

Until the time he got Will. Then, he was basically lost. 

It was Barton's fault, obviously; it had started after a long and frustrating mission in Dubai in which Barton had to swing on a line off that impossibly tall building and there were three separate missed contacts, a misunderstanding in Portuguese (why? Dubai! What the hell!), and a very close shave involving a truck, three camels, floor wax, and a discarded child's musical toy, and basically the whole thing was like a perfect How Not To SHIELD line drawing for children. Disturbed children. 

And Barton came back to the safe house with a couple new holes in him and vomiting because of the knot on his head that also had him seeing double (this didn't stop him knocking out the two guys trying to track him back, but the whole thing slowed him down enough Phil was moments from trying to work up some kind of recovery mission). 

Phil spent fourteen hours digging out lead, stitching him up, and keeping him still and alert enough to know if he started hallucinating or otherwise losing him mind, and no, that wasn't remotely sexy, but _taking care_ of Barton for most of a day knocked on all those buttons, and once he was safe, and Phil had slept, and the reports were filed, and Barton was home, patched up and refusing anything opioid and calling Phil every fifteen minutes for entertainment, then? Then Phil was tense, and after a couple of days he told his phone to send to voicemail and holed up in his quarters with his clean phone and a resolute decision not to think about Barton while he made the call.

Naturally, that was when he 'met' Will.

It was hard to explain the appeal, actually. Will _sounded_ like Barton, and that drew him in, but he also wasn't... he wasn't rough in some of the ways Barton still was, somehow, like he was Barton who had let go of all the things that pained him. He was everything Barton had grown into with more education, less history of getting by on charm and the requisite skills to kill dangerous people, more downtime to grow into himself. Something like that. He was the ideal version, maybe.

That they hit it off the way they did only just proved that all Phil's buttons were dead right about what he needed.

They talked about nothing in particular—well, no. They talked about their dicks, obviously, and Will's mouth on Phil's (dick, not mouth, although that would come up later), with slow, quiet build to all the other physical things that got him hot, but at the end, Phil felt like they had a _connection_ , and even though the part of him that enjoyed logistics and got paid not to be a fucking idiot was screaming at him that this was Will's _job_ , that making Phil feel like this was something real was _how to get repeat customers_ , still, he found himself asking if there was a way he could ensure that he talked to Will the next time he called.

Will chuckled, low and with a strange catch, and said there was, then gave Phil a number to call directly.

Phil committed it to memory, hung up, and called it immediately. Just checking, he said when Will picked up.

So that was where it started and where, if he'd had any sense, he'd have done a little research. Just because he thought his persona was untrackable, that didn't mean he shouldn't make sure he wasn't involving himself in something even more unsavory than phone sex. Not that it was unsavory. Not that it was illegal or that he thought it was disgusting, but obviously it was the kind of thing people didn't talk about in polite circumstances. But he didn't want to break the illusion that Will _could_ be Barton, didn't want to find out the rest of who he was, didn't want to see dark eyes or a taller, slighter figure in his mind's eye.

Plus, he convinced himself, how would he justify who Will was, for the check, and anyway, Phil could take care of himself, if worse came to worst and his persona was more identifiable than he thought. If Will was some kind of terrible plant sent to harm him. It was a paper-thin rationalization, but it was what he was going with. What he stuck with.

After that, he never called through the more general line any more. He just called Will. Once a month, maybe twice. Sometimes, they talked about stuff—not Phil's work, and he certainly didn't want to hear about Will's other clients, but about life, sports, hobbies, and eventually complicated things like ethics and friendship and maybe not the meaning of life (just as well; Phil didn't have an established position on that), but a lot of things. And every month, he got a bill, which he paid.

All right, so that wasn't much of a relationship, although he did note that in terms of monetary cost, it was certainly no worse than taking someone to dinner a couple times a week (It wasn't someone; it was Barton. It was always Barton in his head when he thought that, although _in_ his head, he called him Clint now, and that only got worse when the man started bringing him pastries and coffee and sometimes a brown bag with lunch from somewhere obscure two, three, five times a week, or occasionally even dragging him out somewhere 'because the vampire rumor is gaining traction again'), but since he couldn't have that, and one of his premiere skills as an agent was compartmentalization, at the end of those days, he sometimes (often) called Will and pretended that Will was everything he wanted and needed..

And after a while, that was the pattern, escalating over time. Lust after ~~Barton~~ Clint (fuck it, if he can't call him that in his own head, then fuck it), call Will. It worked pretty well. Or well enough, because along with all the other ways in which he was perfect, Will was preternaturally good at knowing when Phil had had a shitty week.

Impossibly good. 

Phil put it down to the same excellent psychological gamesmanship that had made him so very, very comfortable from the first day.

He also—surely he kept notes or something, because he always remembered what Phil liked. He always knew what to say, both to make him happy and to make him come.

It was pathetic, but amazing, and basically Phil figured that was the best he was likely to do anyway so he kept calling.

It stopped being once a week. It was twice, or three times, maybe sometimes less or more, depending on the world around them.

And then the world went upside down, and Phil wasn't calling anyone any more.

\--

Maybe Will really has retired from the phone sex gig, Phil figures as he walks—plods; it's slow as shit but it's what he can do—on the treadmill. Maybe it's that calls from his old life are unwelcome in some new environment, if he’s moved up in the security job he used to talk about sometimes.

Phil doesn't want to be that guy, the guy who can't take a hint, so he keeps his head down and does his thing, making it through whatever the PT guy decrees and working his way up to a jog (for one minute at a time, good lord this process is slow and demoralizing, but as his extremely peppy nurse keeps reminding him, he's coming back from the dead, and that’s a process that traditionally takes some time).

He hates that she’s right, but he still keeps on keeping on.

He doesn’t call Will on Saturday, and he doesn’t call him again the following Thursday, and even when he really, really wants to, he doesn’t call him the Wednesday after that. He tells himself it will get easier to stop missing him, but it doesn't, and he has to remember not to call again on Monday, and on Thursday, and twice on Saturday when four of the stitches in his plastics tear in an awkward shower incident and he has to spend a very uncomfortable afternoon getting things put back together. It's not that he wants to come, not with his injuries and his current level of stamina; it's just that he wants to hear Will's voice. Damn it.

It doesn't get easier, but it does become a habit: pick up the phone and look at it, and then choose not to call. Choose not to be a creep who can't take no for an answer. Choose to go on alone.

But then, naturally, his ethics fall to pieces when he turns on the (real-live-news) TV, and Barton (Clint, because at this point he can't even have pastries, so it's Clint, definitely) is on the screen. 

It hasn’t even been six weeks since he decided not to call, and his resolve crumbles as he watches the team huddle up and then separate, watches Stark pick up Clint by the scruff of his neck (not really; the armor of his field vest is sturdy and the back of the yoke has to be what Stark latches onto) and dumps him on the top of a building. And Phil is rapt, glued to the screen--yeah, he’s definitely not going to be able to tolerate having them out in the world without him. He probably needs to have a conversation with Nick about how he’s going to be looped in; it’s a weakness, but he doesn’t think he can solve it by the time he’s in the field, so having the data is going to be pretty important for making sure he’s doing his best work.

He watches the whole battle unfold—today it's flying metallic octopus things, complete with suckers they use to grab building and cars to change direction as they go—then sits down with a sigh and gets out his phone. He looks at it for several minutes, then puts it away again for an impressive six minutes, then he tells himself he's being an asshole, but that doesn't stop him from dialing the familiar number.

He doesn’t expect a pickup. Instead he gets a click, then a weird pause, then a sigh. “Damn it. This phone—shit. Yeah?”

“Oh. I. This is Jedid—” Phil stops as an array of other noises filter in, one of which is definitely the landing equipment dropping out of a quinjet. And another of which is _definitely Tony Stark._ What the... “Wait. Wait, what. You're in... _Barton?!_ ”

There's another long pause and the growled word, “Fury,” and then the line goes dead, but what the actual fuck. Or... Phil considers for a minute, then shakes his head. He is, obviously, a fucking idiot. Will doesn't _sound_ like Clint. He's not _as perfect as_ Clint. He doesn't _keep notes_ about Phil. He knows him, he's perfect, and he sounds like himself. Fuck.

It takes just a few seconds to tumble to all of that, and then Phil is immediately torn about the sex-with-a-subordinate part, but along with that is this: Clint obviously thinks he's dead, and, based on that other call? He obviously knew all along, or at least realized somewhere down the line, to whom he was speaking, and he kept right on taking Phil's calls. Shit. And paying back his payments with lunches and donuts, and letting Phil keep his incredibly stupid illusions. Shit, shit, damn it, shit. He really should have done that background work.

He gives himself three minutes to pace and get some kind of control of his breathing, and then he picks up his real phone and dials Clint's personal number. There's no response (because Clint is probably somewhere in the middle of the kind of epic freakout Phil's spent ten years doing his best to keep at bay), so he says screw it and dials Natasha. The hell with Nick's big plans; it's pretty clear he's just blown his cover past all hope of recovery, and now his priority is Clint.

She picks up immediately. “This? This is how you tell me? And apparently, based on the past five minutes, him?”

“I. I didn't know he was... Apparently I have a blind spot.”

“ _You think?_ ”

“Sorry. I'm sorry. I didn't realize he was—“

“Invested? In love with you? Willing to let you pretend?”

“I didn't realize he was _him_.”

She's silent for several seconds, during which Phil is certain she's swearing at him in Russian and probably four or five more obscure languages in her head, then says, “Call Fury. I think Clint might succeed in killing him if he gets there unwarned, and this is your mess, not his.”

“I will. Call Clint? Make sure—“

“I always do.” Natasha sighs. “And I always do for you, too, asshole.”

The line goes dead as Phil raises his eyebrows. Natasha rarely resorts to crude insults in English, or at least, not aloud; her tongue is a precision instrument and she knows how and prefers to say things that hurt. 'Asshole' doesn't hurt, and she surely knows it won't, but it still conveys her point: he's wrong, very wrong, and he needs to take action to make amends.

Which might turn out to be a challenge, given his current physical limitations, but surely there are no excuses to be made, so he'll need to find a way. He looks at the phone again, then shakes his head ( _idiot._ ) and dials Nick to fill him in.

Nick, to his credit, doesn't ask for the whole backstory in the moment, although he does expect a report when Phil's up to it, and does at least appreciate the warning; his home is effectively windowless for good reasons, but he does have doors and vents, and if Clint feels like actually killing him for keeping this secret, they all know one of them is probably going to get dead in the scuffle. 

Which Phil would prefer to avoid. As he is not dead himself, and keeping some of his only friends alive is a high priority, turns out. He promises the report in a few days, hangs up, and sinks down into a chair to shake his head at himself and wonder at what point he leveled up in Being A Dumbass. Jesus.

\--

The phone, he doesn't know what to do with. Clearly, he can't chuck it, because what if Will (Clint) decides to contact him that way? But what if he doesn't? (He doesn't. The phone sits there silently all week). And he doesn't feel good about calling Clint directly.

They've made each other come (he assumes. Shit. Clint has made _him_ come, anyway) a hundred times, but Phil doesn't know how to navigate the topic. What will he say, anyway? “Hey, Barton, good to hear your voice, thanks for knowing exactly what to say to make me shoot all over my belly?” Or maybe, “I've missed the way you make my dick twitch by telling me about your day?” Because not saying anything about any of that also seems wrong (“Agent. Good day at the range shooting things that are definitely not come?” No.)

And then he also recalls the lunches, the absurd conversations (wide-ranging and beautiful) over Chinese takeout and a stack of forms on Phil's desk, the time they played frisbee golf... did Clint think he _knew_? Were they _dating_ , only without in-person sex? Who did that? And why?

Needless to say, continuing to think about the topic in isolation isn't helping anything, and one of the chief frustrations about the continuing medication and lack of worthwhile work is that Phil doesn't have any other compartments to compartmentalize _into_ , and so he just worries about it, and feels sick about it, and does what the PT guy says some more.

And writes that report while he wonders whether he should call Clint. On either phone.

Finally, ten days after what he's started referring to in his head as The Awakening (probably a little overwrought, but it suits), he turns to a fresh page in a legal pad and starts making a list of all the ways in which his choices have sucked. It's a long list, but he feels like he's going to need it because when he talks to Clint, which he is going to, he'll probably get sidetracked (see again, medication and lack of compartments). He's written about three lines when there's a knock, or actually, more of a thump, at his door.

He looks up, and waits for whoever it is to come on in—hospital staff don't stand on much ceremony about whether or not a patient's ass is covered before barging in, even if they tap the door first—but no one does, so he says, “Come in.”

After a minute, the handle turns, and then Clint lets himself in, awkwardly, carrying a drink holder with coffee, which Phil is sure he is still not allowed (he gives zero fucks, because it's smells amazing) and a pastry box from a place Clint frequents. “Uh, hi.”

“Hi?” Phil pushes back from the table, slower than he wants to because he's sore as shit from his _three_ -minute turtle-pace jogs yesterday, and they still aren't letting him try a single push-up so his arms are weak as hell. He gets himself upright just as the nurse hurries in to take away the coffee, but Phil glares at him. “Yes, I know, against medical advice. I'm living dangerously today.”

“Sir, your chart clearly says—“

“That I am an adult?” 

“That you definitely aren't allowed caffeine.”

“It's decaf,” Clint says. He looks at Phil as he says it, and that is definitely a lie, but the nurse narrows his eyes at him, then back at Phil, then sighs and crosses his arms over his chest. 

“I suppose the pastries are low-fat, whole-grain...”

“Maybe not,” Clint says, “but Coulson's all about restraint, right?” He's still looking at Phil, and Phil closes his eyes because somehow, despite everything, there's a bright spark in Clint's eyes. It says Clint knows what happened and forgives him for all his keeping his hands off, somehow, and the thing is, that's almost worse than him being angry, because it speaks to the ways in which he undervalues himself and Phil hates that.

The nurse tries again. “Visiting hours end in twenty minutes.”

“I've had no visitors besides the director,” Phil says. “It's been weeks. I think a small exception could be made.”

“We don't do exceptions.”

Phil shakes his head. “Learn. I'm sure somewhere on the internet there's a training video of some kind. He looks to the door. “Thank you for your help.”

He hasn't used his Coulson voice, the voice that requires underlings to move it, in months now, and it's gratifying to find that the nurse is walking back to the door before it occurs to him to object. 

“Fine. Ten extra minutes.”

“We'll behave.” Clint holds the door and closes it behind him, then turns back. “So, Nat says—“

Phil doesn't care what Nat says. Well, no, he does, but really what he cares about right this minute is, if Clint is Will and Clint is here and Clint forgives him, they have a lot of catching up to do. He holds up a hand. “I'm assuming she told you I didn't know?”

“I'm assuming she told you I _did_?”

“No, I realized that when I realized you were you.” Phil shrugs. “Fucking compartments.”

“And?” Clint's fussing with the pastry box now, looking away, and Phil takes a second to just look at him, to see the exhaustion in his stance and skin tone.

“And...” Phil waits for Clint to look up again, then shrugs. “And he was always you.”

“But you said—”

“I know. I mean, I wanted him to be.”

“Really?” Clint smiles, his shoulders relaxing a little, and Phil smiles back.

“Yes, really. He sounded like you, only happier—“

“Because I—he, whatever—had you. Only then you never said anything, so I figured you wanted to keep it on the down-low. Well, and I figured, it was one thing to call a phone sex line, but another thing to actually make money that way.”

“How'd that happen, anyway?”

“Uh, because until you started calling, I was still sometimes picking up some cash—during downtime, obviously, not on the clock—talking to people until they came? Easy money, started when I was a kid?” He chews his lip a little. “Once it was you, I mean, I stopped.”

“You did?”

“Well, yeah. Listening to you come kind of fucked up my game.”

Phil isn't sure how to respond to that. “Uh. Sorry?”

“What? No. It was kind of a habit by then anyway? Like, extra cash because you never know when you'll be short? Um, and I don't actually want to talk about my porn career with you except as relates to you, directly. Muffin? They are, actually, less terrible for you than some things.” Clint's ears have gone pink, and he offers the box. Phil takes a muffin and the offered coffee.

He holds the coffee for a minute, smells it (oh god, he misses coffee), then sets it and the muffin down. “Thanks, and I want that coffee, but just, right now? You're more important.”

Clint raises his eyebrows and looks around. “There a thermometer in here?”

“No. I didn't tell you because I didn't think—it was never about judging you for the work. I was calling! Who would I have been to judge anyway!”

“Yeah, but, you know, kind of whorey. I mean, before you I probably made a couple hundred people come. Maybe more.”

“I guess it was good practice.”

“What?”

“Well, you took me right where I wanted to go, even when I didn't know you were you.” Phil shakes his head and moves toward Clint. “This conversation is ludicrous, but I want to be clear: there was never a moment anywhere in here where I felt unhappy about you doing that work, except in that I was a little jealous.”

“I stopped.”

“You said. But even if you hadn't, I didn't have a hold on you. I knew I was calling someone doing a job, and I assumed he had more than one client.”

Clint sips his own coffee, then sets it down too. “So, if now we wanted to, you know, actually...?”

“If?” Clint moves a couple steps toward Phil as well until he's definitely in his space, and Phil nods. 

“So, that's a yes? Maybe we can actually have—“

“Dates? Sex? The rest of the relationship?”

Clint grins and blushes a little more. “Starting maybe now?”

“Maybe. Or sooner.” Phil feels his own face heating at the bald admission of wanting everything immediately, but it's true, and at this point, given everything, he probably owes Clint a lot of honesty, at least.

Clint steps back a little. “So, you told me, once, that I always know how to make you feel good.”

“True. On and off the phone.”

“How medically-cleared are you?”

“Not enough for coffee; enough to jog for possibly five minutes sometime next—“ He breaks off when Clint closes in on him, brushing their lips together and then returning more firmly, opening up for him and then pulling back, leaning their foreheads together. “Uh. Next week, but I think I just passed the heart rate test.”

Clint chuckles. “We could sit down if you want.”

Phil shakes his head and toes off the hospital slippers he's wearing, then pulls Clint with him to the bed. “Better idea,” he says. 

Clint pulls his boots off and follows, stretching out and pulling Phil close against him. “Yeah, I could stay like this a while,” he says. He pauses. “I didn't think I was ever going to get to touch. Outside of missions, I mean.”

“Me either.” Phil burrows in closer yet, tangling their legs together, and kisses Clint again. “You know they're still going to come kick you out in a little while.”

“They can try.” Clint shrugs and points at the vent. “I bet I can circumvent their efforts, though.”

Phil laughs. “True. But maybe we can make up for a little lost time before we get to that point.”

Clint kisses him again. “Maybe.”

“Not sure how much I can actually do.”

“Don't care.”

All they manage is making out and a little bit of gentle rocking against each other before the nurse comes back (he takes the coffee, damn it), but it's the best day Phil's had in _years_. And Clint pops back in through the vent around midnight and curls up with him for the night, and that's even better.

\--

Epilogue, ten months later

“We're really going to do this? While you're there, and I'm here?” Clint's voice is rough, the way he gets when he's really turned on but trying not to be too eager. Phil loves that he knows that sound.

He leans forward and adjusts the camera. “It beats the hell out of voice-only,” he says. “Not that I ever had any big complaints about voice-only. Just be glad my security clearance means virtually no one gets eyes on this.”

“Yeah, I gotta agree with that.” Clint bites his lip, then pulls his t-shirt over his head, adding, “Course, my end, we got Stark, but I think you returning from the dead has put the fear of Coulson in him, at least a little. I hope.”

“He and I have already discussed data security,” Phil says. “And so have he and Pepper.” He engages the lock on his office aboard the Bus, then undoes his tie and starts on his buttons. “Talk to me, Barton. Tell me what you'd like to see.”

Clint groans and unbuttons his jeans.


End file.
